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Age of Alexander
The '''Age of Alexander' lasted from about 371 BC until 280 BC. It began with the end of the collapse of Athenian and Spartan hegemony over Ancient Greece, until forcibly reunited by the rise of Macedon. It then ended with the disintegration of the great Hellenistic empire established by Alexander the Great into four stable power blocks. With Athens and Sparta having engineered their own decline through the Peloponnesian Wars, the future of Greek civilisation was paradoxically to be shaped by a kingdom in northern Greece which some said was not Greek at all: Macedon. The man who turned it from a Greek backwater into a force to be reckoned with was Philip II. Blending the Greek Phalanx and Persian cavalry into a formidable army, by the end of his reign he was ruler of Greece. In the spring of 334, his twenty-two year old son, Alexander the Great, crossed into Asia on a campaign so brilliant that it would leave his name a myth down the ages. He broke the power of Achaemenid Persia in a series of decisive battles, most notably the battles of the Granicus River, Issus, and Gaugamela, overthrowing Persian King Darius III and conquering the empire in its entirety. in 327 BC, Alexander went further, through the mountain passes into India, and won the epic Battle of the Hydaspes, where he faced 200 war-elephants. Here he finally turned back after his army, worn-out from years of campaigning, refused to go any further. Alexander lived too short a time to prove to posterity that even he could not have held the unity of his empire together for long; the largest of its time. He died in Babylon in 323 BC, and after forty-odd years of fighting between his generals, the Hellenistic world settled into four big states: Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Syria and Persia; Pergamon in western Anatolia; and Macedon itself. Alexander's legacy was the diffusion of Greek culture from Egypt to beyond the Khyber Pass, and the founding of some twenty-five cities that bore his name, most notably Alexandria in Egypt. But nothing could dim the memory of Alexander the Great himself, who became the model against which great military leaders measured themselves; millennia after his death in 1798 AD, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt, in part because he wanted to do what Alexander had done. Meanwhile, the Greek east seemed strangely uninterested in what was going on in the western Mediterranean. This was a formative period for the Romans. By the early 3rd century, the legions had conquered almost all of Italy, allowing the republic to now tap allied manpower from the whole region. History Rise of Macedonia With Athens and Sparta having engineered their own decline through the Peloponnesian Wars, the future of Greek civilisation was, paradoxically, to be shaped by a kingdom in northern Greece which some said was not Greek at all: Macedon. It was indeed a rough, tough place, its rulers still somewhat like the warlords. Unusually for Greece, it had a hereditary king, with a stable dynasty stretching back to the 7th-century BC. Sparta also had a monarchy, but was in many ways a characteristic Greek city-state, in that there were democratic checks on the ruler. Macedon was more reminiscent of the feudalism of later societies; the king and his warrior aristocracy could do as they pleased. Yet much like Sparta, her army was formidable, combining the traditional Greek phalanx with greater emphasis on heavy cavalry than any of the other Greek city-states; perhaps learnt from the Persians during Macedon's period as a vassal between 512-479 BC. Another advantage was the timing of the rise of Macedon, just when the Greece world was beginning to grasp siege-warfare; the first known catapult was invented in Syracuse, Sicily around 400 BC. Throughout the classical era of Ancient Greece, Macedon had relatively little involvement with her southern neighbours. The man who turned them into a force to be reckoned with was Philip II (359-336 BC). He became regent of Macedon in 359 BC, then king in his own right three years later, and began a steady acquisition of territory at the expense of other Greek states. Philip was one of those rare conquerors in history who blended military genius with skilful diplomacy. With the steel fist and velvet glove he gradually extended his rule over central Greece to the pass of Thermopylae and the entire north Aegean coastline, without provoking serious opposition. It was only in 340 BC when Philip threatened Byzantium, controlling the vital trade route to the Black Sea, that Athens was finally alerted to the Macedonian threat. An alliance of Greek city-states was formed to oppose him, led by Athens and Thebes. These opposing forces met at the Battle of Chaironeia (August 338 BC), where the Macedonians crushed both flanks and the allied line dissolved into a rout. Philip follows his victory with a bout of diplomacy, calling together all the Greek city-states at Corinth and coercing them to form a military alliance under Macedonian leadership; all except Sparta which stood proudly aloof. The terms of peace were not harsh, city-states retained a large measure of internal self-government, in return for adherence to Macedonian foreign policy, in particular to go to war with Achaemenid Persia. In recent years, Greece had been awash with rumours that the once mighty Persian Empire was in decline. Xerxes I (d. 465 BC), the invader of Greece, had himself been assassinated by a court official; he would not be the last Persian king to die this way. The subsequent years were plagued by a succession of rebellions usually led by ambitious provincial governors, and though imperial rule was restored in the end, the cost was great; Egypt for instance won her independence in 404 and held it for almost sixty years. Part of this story is commemorated by a famous book, the March of the Ten Thousand, the tale of the long journey home of an army of Greek mercenaries after an unsuccessful attempt to usurp the Persian throne by the king's younger brother. However, the League of Corinth proved the culmination of Philip’s work and reign. At a feast to celebrate his daughter's wedding in 336 BC, he was assassinated by one of his courtiers for unclear reasons. Philip nevertheless bequeathed to his son Alexander the Great a strong kingdom, and the best-trained and organised army in all of Greece. Alexander the Great On his Phillip's death, his son Alexander (336-323) ascended to the Macedonian throne at just 20-years-of-age; he would be known to history as Alexander the Great. At this young age, Alexander had already proven himself well-equipped to share in his father’s military adventures. The young prince had received the best education that Greece could provide; for three years, the great philosopher Aristotle himself had been the royal tutor. They no doubt studied Homer, and the Iliad became a profound source of inspiration for Alexander; he carried an abridged version of the tome in his tent while achieving military feats to put the Homeric heroes to shame. Alexander and his most intimate friend from childhood, Hephaestion, were compared by their contemporaries with Achilles and his own lover Patroclus. Alexander was only sixteen when he was left in charge of Macedon while his father was on campaign. During this time he crushed a rebellious Thracian tribe, and as a rewarded was allowed to found a new town in their territory, Alexandropolis, the first of many to be named after him. At eighteen, he embarked on military campaign with his father, and was credited with leading the cavalry charge that crushed the Athenian and Theban left flank at Chaeronaea (338 BC). Nonetheless, news of Philip's death roused one more kick of Greek independence throughout his budding empire, but Alexander wasted no time in crushing the rebels, and making an example of Thebes; some 6,000 were killed storming the city, the rest of the population was enslaved, and the territory divided between its neighbours. This was the real end of four centuries of the Greek city-state; henceforth foreign governor would rule the Peloponnese. Alexander’s reign had thus begun with difficulties, but once they were surmounted, he could turn his attention to the Persia. In the spring of 334, still at the age of only twenty-two, Alexander crossed to Asia at the head of a vanguard of 30,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry, on a campaign so brilliant that it would leave his name a myth down the ages. After engaging in a spot of romantic tourism at the site of Troy, Alexander faced the first of three major battles with the Persian a short distance to the east. At the Battle of the Granicus River (May 334 BC), Alexander personally led the cavalry charge through the water that routed the forces of the Persian governor of Anatolia. In every battle he would be his own best soldier, displaying almost reckless courage, and was wounded several times in the mêlée; he believed his mother’s ancestor to be Homer’s Achilles and strove to emulate the hero. After the Greek victory, Alexander proceeded along the southern coast, with cities either opening their gates or surrendering after brief resistance. It was during this time, that Alexander took a detour to Gordium, where a mystic was said to have promised the lordship of Asia to whoever could undo a seemingly impenetrable knot of rope. According to the story, Alexander hacked the Gordian Knot apart with his sword, proclaiming that it did not matter how the knot was undone. He finally met the King Darius III (336-330 BC) himself and the main Persian force at the Battle of Issus (333 BC), near Antioch. Though outmanoeuvred by Darius' significantly larger army, the Greek cavalry turned the battle by charging directly at the Persian king. Darius fled the battle, causing his army to collapse, and left behind his wife, his mother, his two daughters, and a fabulous treasury. Alexander supposedly treated the royal women with every courtesy; Darius' mother had a lifelong respect and genuine friendship with him. Within a mere eighteen months, Alexander had cleared the Persians out of Anatolia, which they had held for two centuries. This was followed by a campaign that swept south along the coast through Syria and Palestine, occupying port after port, and crippling the Persian navy. Most simply opening their gates to the conqueror. Only the greatest of them all, the former Phoenician city of Tyre, resisted. The heavily-fortified island was captured only after a long and difficult siege. In the ancient world it is unwise to resist a conqueror and lose; some 10,000 defenders were executed, and 30,000 residents enslaved. After Tyre, most of the towns on the route to Egypt quickly capitulated, but he was sideline by another lengthy siege at Gaza. By autumn of 332 BC, Alexander was in Egypt, where the Persian governor rapidly surrendered. He spent the winter there, where his pragmatic actions first indicated how he would set about keeping control of distant conquests with distinct cultural traditions. One method was the established outposts of Greek culture, founding the greatest of the cities to bear his name, Alexandria; one of twenty-five he would found over the course of his conquests. Another method, equally important, was to present himself in the guise of a local ruler. To this end he carried out the sacrifice of a sacred bull to the Egyptian god Apis at Memphis, and made the arduous pilgrimage to a celebrated oracle in its oasis at Siwa. The Egyptian priests pronounced him the son of the deity Amun, and crown him Pharaoh. In the spring, Alexander was ready to resume his hunting for the Persian king, who Alexander would meet once more at the Battle of Gaugamela (October 331 BC) on the Tigres near the modern city of Mosul. Circumstances favoured the Persians; they heavily outnumbered the Greeks, had chosen the battlefield, and the Greeks had had an arduous trek across Mesopotamia. This was a fiercely fought battle with heavy losses on both sides. Again Alexander's cavalry charge on the Persian centre proved decisive, and once more Darius fled the field. Gaugamela would be the final and decisive encounter between the two, and in the aftermath Persia began to disintegrate. The great cities of Babylon and Susa surrendered without a fight, and the Persian capital of Persepolis fell after another brief battle. Alexander allowed his troops to sack the city for several days, and, as a symbolic gesture of the end of the long wars between Greece and Persia, he burned the king’s palace; at least that's one story, it may have been drunken accident that got out of control. He spent five months in Persepolis before setting off to chase down Darius. He relentlessly pursued him across Persia for several months, until he was assassinated by a Persian governor called Bessus; he then pursued Bessus for another twelve months until he was handed over and executed. With the last claimant out of the way, to gain credibility with the Persians, Alexander adopted the ceremonial dress and court rituals of the emperor, accepting the homage that the East rendered to rulers it thought to be godlike. The Macedonians were less than thrilled with the changes in him, and there were a number of attempts on his life; they were not successful, and his relatively mild reprisals do not suggest that the situation was ever very dangerous for him. For two years Alexander toured his new empire, subduing pockets of resistance and establishing Greek settlements. Then in 327 BC, with the Persian Empire firmly under his control and newly married to the Bactrian princess Roxana, Alexander went further, through the mountain passes into India. 'His ambition now was to conquer the world, which he believed ended at a sea beyond India. After passing through Afghanistan, where Kandahar is another city to commemorate his name, he penetrated a hundred miles or so beyond the Indus River. Having heard of the exploits of the great Macedonian general, some submitted to him but many did not. Alexander met and defeated King Porus of Paurava at the epic Battle of the Hydaspes (May 326 BC), where he faced 200 war-elephants. Large areas of the Punjab were subsequently absorbed into his empire. Shortly after this, his army, worn-out after years of campaigning in hostile terrain, refused to go any further, fearing reports of a vast army with 5,000 war-elephants waiting for them in the Ganges Valley; presumably what would become the vast Maurya Empire (322-185 BC). So at last, Alexander ended his astonishing adventure and turned for home. Back in Persia, Alexander held his most spectacular gesture of cultural integration, a mass marriage of 9,000 of his Macedonian officers to Persian noblewomen at a great feast at Susa in 324 BC; symbolizing a "lasting harmony" between West and East. Alexander's own bride on this occasion was Darius’ daughter Stateira II; another daughter married his lifelong friend and probably lover Hephaestion. Less than a year later, Hephaestion died of a fever, sending Alexander into extravagant mourning. Upon recovering, he returned to planning to expand his empire but would never realize them. After a banquet at Babylon in 323 BC, Alexander was himself suddenly taken ill with a fever from which he never recovered. There he died at the age of thirty-two, just ten years after he had left Macedon. When asked on his deathbed who should succeed him, Alexander supposedly replied "''to the strongest". Hellenistic World after Alexander Alexander lived too short a time to prove to posterity that even he could not have held the unity of his empire together for long. After his death, his generals swooped like vultures for the lands they could get and keep, and the empire was dissolving even before the birth of his posthumous son by Roxana; they were protected for a few years by Alexander's mother, but all three were eventually assassinated. After forty-odd years of fighting, the Hellenistic world settled into four big states, each of them a hereditary monarchy. Ptolemy Soter (d. 283 BC), one of Alexander’s best generals, seized power in Egypt, and to it he conveyed the valuable prize of Alexander’s body. Ptolemaic Egypt (305-30 BC) with its capital in Alexandria was the longest-lived and richest of the successor states, with his descendants ruling for nearly three hundred years until the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC. They took over the divine status and prestige of the Pharaohs, and the practice of marrying their sisters. Ptolemy also endowed Alexandria with one of the greatest libraries of the ancient world, and founded the Museum, a school of advanced study to rival Athens. The descendants of Seleucus (d. 281 BC), another Macedonian general, ruled a huge kingdom stretching from Afghanistan to Syria, with a capital eventually at Seleucia, near Babylon; the Seleucid Empire (312-63 BC). While a Seleucid state endured until conquered by the Roman general Pompey in 63 BC, from the mid-2nd-century BC it was little more than a rump state with the rise of the Parthian Empire. Meanwhile, Anatolia was disrupted by invading Celts in the 3rd-century BC, but much of it was retained as the Kingdom of Pergamon (281-133 BC), by a dynasty called the Attalids, who transformed it into one of the major cultural centres of the Greek world. It was there that people perfected parchment when the Ptolemies cut-off supplies of papyrus. As for Macedon itself, it was racked for decades by violent coups and counter-coups, and only in 276 BC was another stable dynasty re-established. She nevertheless retained a loose hegemony over the Greek city-states to the south, though a flickering tradition of independence lived on. Perhaps the most significant effect of the century after 323 BC, during which the Hellenistic world settled into a rough balance of power, was that little attention was paid to events further western Mediterranean. With great powers preoccupied with events in the eastern Mediterranean and Asia, a peaceful setting was provided for Rome to conquered all of Italy and settle matters with Carthage. What the Hellenic world meant in cultural interplay is more difficult to assess. Greek was now the official language of the whole eastern Mediterranean and Near East. The cities were the substance of the new world, for beyond them the native populations of the countryside were probably not much affected; some of them seem to have resented what would now be called "westernization". Alexandria, Antioch and Seleucia quickly achieved populations of between one and two hundred thousand. This reflected economic growth, for the wars of Alexander and his successors had released a great deal of booty which had been accumulated by the Persian emperors. It stimulated economic life all over the region, thus the Hellenistic world was richer than its predecessors and population growth was one sign of this. Scores of cities had been founded and urban life flourished in the East like never before; theatres and gymnasiums abounded, games and festivals were held in all of them. Soon they produced their own Greek literature, art, and thinking, though it often lacked the vigour of Classical Greece; the Macedonians had never known the life of the city-state. Yet much of it was of high quality and now seems lacking in weight only because of the gigantic achievements of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Thus the lasting legacy of Alexander's extraordinary conquests was a thin veneer of Greek culture stretching from Egypt to beyond the Khyber Pass, but undoubtedly a more closely connected world than ever before. But nothing could dim the memory of Alexander the Great himself. He became the model against which great military leaders measured themselves: Pompey Magnus conquered the east to emulate Alexander and claimed to have worn his 260-year-old cloak at his triumph; Julius Caesar and Augustus both made pilgrimages to his tomb in Alexandria in Egypt, before it was destroyed sometime in the 3rd-century AD. There is a passage in the Qur'an that probably refers to Alexander. In medieval Europe, he was made a member of the Nine Worthies, a group of heroes who encapsulated all the ideal qualities of chivalry. Millennia after his death, the regimental song of British Grenadiers, written in the early the 18th century, begins with the line: “''Some talk of Alexander, and some of Hercules''”. The tourist to Troy in 333 BC would be pleased with the choice of his companion for the opening line and with the order of listing. Roman Conquest of Italy From the low point of the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BC, the expansion of Roman power resumed more smoothly. The Roman legions were obviously an important element in her success in this, but another was political. Victories on the battlefield were followed by quite generous settlements, in which defeated cities could participate in the success of Rome. The closeness of that participation varied: some of the nearest communities were granted full Roman citizenship; and more distant cities became effectively client states, obliged the supply of troops, but left in charge of their own internal affairs, and receiving their fair share of the spoils. Gradual expansion over Italy eventually brought Rome into conflict with the strongest and fiercest of the semi-nomadic hill-tribes to the south-east, the Samnites. In a series of three wars, spanning six decades, that pulled all the major powers of central Italy onto one side or the other, Rome met her stiffest test yet. The '''First Samnite War (343-341 BC) was sparked when the Samnites began encroaching on Campania to the south, who begged for aid from Rome. This phase was a brief but consequential affair; the Romans prevailed in the two major battles, and in the process acquired control over Campania, renowned for its rich soil and soft lifestyle. The war was closely followed a revolt by the Latin cities, suing for full equality with the Romans; the Latin War (340-338 BC). Once again Rome prevailed, and the Latins returned to the fold on harsher terms; ironically those Latins who had not joined the revolt, were granted the full citizenship that the rebels had been demanding. In the Second Samnite War (326-304 BC), it was the Romans who were the aggressors, but Rome would never declare wars unprovoked. Instead they set about needling the Samnites into attacking first, by settling colonies in their territory. Eventually Rome got the war it had wanted honourably, and the early momentum was clearly with them; Samnite allies were peeled off, and the legions won victory after victory on the battlefield. The Samnites even sued for peace, but the Senate offered such preposterous terms that the war continued. It would prove to be a huge mistake. At the Battle of Caudine Forks (321 BC), the Samnites executed such a brilliant ambush that the Romans surrendered without even drawing their swords. In the end, the Samnites decided it would be better for future relations to let the Romans go, but only after the humiliating ritual of passing under the yoke. To the honest crazed Romans, this was far worse than being killed on the battlefield. Rome probably also signed a five-year peace treaty, though later historians invented stories to deny this. Yet they used the time well, beginning to radically alter the legions organisation and tactics; the solidly massed Phalanx was abandoned in favour of a new military formation known as the Maniple system, based on companies of 120 men, arrayed in 3 ranks. The essence of the change was flexibility: ranks had spaces between them so they could give ground if needed; companies formed quicker on rough terrain; and had clearer leadership capable of independent action to react to threats or opportunities. Rome also began construction on the strategically important Appian Way connecting Rome to Campania for rapid troop movement and secure supply-lines. Open hostilities resumed in 316 BC, and despite some early setbacks, Rome gradually gained the upper hand. The Samnites, however, kept the pressure up by encouraging the remaining Etruscan cities to join the war. Despite fighting on two fronts, the Etruscans were eventually defeated at the hard-fought Battle of Lake Vadimo (310 BC), after which they never again caused the Romans too much trouble. They capitulated two years later, leaving the Samnites to carry on alone. The Samnites held on as long as they could, but finally reluctantly sued for peace in 304 BC. Despite the struggle, Rome now controlled either directly or through alliance almost all of Italy outside Magna Graecia, and was moving inexorably in the direction of imperial master, rather than simply powerful neighbour. The fiercely independent Samnites soon chaffed under Roman dominance, and after 10 years of peace sparked the Third Samnite War (298-290 BC). They built a coalition of every enemy of Rome; Samnites, Etruscans, Gallic mercenaries, and Umbrians (hill-tribes to the north-east). This last desperate attempt to retain independence would essentially be decided at the Battle of Sentinum (295 BC), the largest ever fought in Italy to that date, with 40,000 men on both sides. The Romans faced a combined army of the four strongest tribes in Italy, and emerged victorious. The Samnites fought on for another five years but the result was never in doubt; their resentment would long linger, and two centuries later, the Samnites would be at the centre of the Social War against Roman discrimination. After five decades of struggle, all that now stood between the Roman Republic and an Italian wide empire, was the Greek cities of Magna Graecia in the far south. But success had brought Rome face to face with the other great powers of the Mediterranean; the Greeks in the Pyrrhic War; Cathage and Syracuse in the epic Punic Wars; and the Greeks again in the Macedonian Wars. Category:Historical Periods